Hollywood Rushes to VidCon to Connect With Millennials

LOS ANGELES — Ask movie marketers about the value of fan conventions, and their answer usually starts with an exhausted sigh. Between Comic-Con and WonderCon and Dragon Con, just to name a few, there are more cons than they need or want.

Well, add another one to the list: VidCon has become too big to ignore.

Founded six years ago in the basement of a hotel here, VidCon brings together online video creators and their fans. Last year, about 21,000 people — teenagers mostly — paid up to $150 each to see YouTube personalities like Bart Baker, attend panels (“The Family that Vlogs Together, Stays Together”) and browse 600,000 square feet of exhibit space at the Anaheim Convention Center, where the annual event is now held.

The next VidCon, scheduled for June 23-25, will attract roughly 30,000 people, organizers say, and Hollywood will be there in a major way for the first time. New exhibitors and sponsors include 20th Century Fox, Netflix and Warner Bros., which is planning an elaborate stunt for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” its Harry Potter prequel. Universal Pictures, which made a low-key VidCon debut last year, will return to screen “The Secret Life of Pets,” a big-budget animated film.

Rather than just showing film clips, as it has done in years past, Lionsgate will raise the ante by bringing Emma Roberts, the star of “Nerve,” a coming thriller. DreamWorks Animation has a promotion planned for “Trolls,” which is set for release in November.

“Even if I wanted to fight against it, it would be like bailing out the Titanic,” Hank Green, VidCon’s co-founder, said of the Hollywood rush.

Other new non-entertainment VidCon sponsors include AOL, Calvin Klein, Hasbro, Marriott, Mars, NYX Cosmetics and Samsung. Returning companies include Best Buy, Covergirl, Kia and Taco Bell. The convention’s biggest sponsor, of course, is YouTube, which will bring in more than 200 representatives from top advertisers and try to connect them to video creators.

In many ways, VidCon is a younger version of Comic-Con International, the pop culture bacchanal attended by more than 130,000 people each summer in San Diego. Comic-Con has long been a powerful tool for movie and television marketers because it gives them one-stop access to Generation X fans. With its emphasis on YouTube personalities, VidCon serves up the millennial and postmillennial equivalent.

The VidCon audience, which tends to be more female than male, is one that “advertisers are finding more and more difficult to reach through traditional marketing channels,” said Brent Weinstein, the head of digital media at United Talent Agency, which handles VidCon sponsorships. Television is losing its effect; millennials and post-millennials consume programming from video-on-demand services. In fact, studies have shown that this demographic tunes out anything that looks like a traditional ad, online or otherwise.

But they do pay attention to their Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook feeds. By placing a product — movie, lipstick, candy bar, doodad — directly in front of the socially voracious VidCon swarms, marketers can sometimes create meaningful digital chatter that stretches far beyond the convention hall.

“It’s a chance for a direct conversation with a very important, hard-to-reach audience,” said Blair Rich, Warner’s executive vice president of worldwide movie marketing. Noting that many YouTube personalities have global followings, Ms. Rich added, “The VidCon influencers offer tremendous scale, and that really matters to us.”

Along with “Fantastic Beasts,” due in theaters in November, Warner will use the convention to promote “Lights Out,” a coming thriller that started as a YouTube short.

Just as it took Hollywood years to hone its Comic-Con playbook, studios are still learning what works at VidCon.

Last year, spotting what it thought was a perfect opportunity for its low-budget “Jem and the Holograms,” Universal ran a contest in which convention attendees could win cameo roles by making and sharing “Jem”-related videos. If the stunt attracted any attention, it certainly did not help the movie, which took in just $2.2 million at the box office.

Universal got a better result for “The Visit,” a horror film that was screened at VidCon 2015. Attendees reacted with positive posts, which Universal then used to build additional interest a few weeks later at Comic-Con. “The Visit,” directed by M. Night Shyamalan and costing $5 million to make, collected nearly $100 million worldwide.

“As an emerging event, VidCon can be a real accelerator for a certain type of movie,” said Michael Moses, Universal’s co-president of marketing.

Hollywood did not wake up to VidCon overnight. Television networks like Nickelodeon, NBC and HGTV were early adopters; Jeffrey Katzenberg, the departing chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, gave the convention’s keynote address in 2014.

Still, the entertainment industry’s more aggressive embrace is sudden enough that it could create a backlash among attendees, especially if VidCon’s celebration of online video appears muddled as a result. Blistering growth — 359 panels are planned for June, up from 297 last year — inevitably gets messy.

Mr. Green, who founded VidCon with his brother, John Green, the author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” said he ultimately views Hollywood’s arrival as a positive development.

“The overlap is great, in part because it’s important for studios to understand video fans and creators, both the culture and the excitement,” he said. “That will hopefully lead to fewer studio efforts in this area that are inauthentic and gross.”